Inspiration from physics for thinking about economics, finance and social systems

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Megabanks: too complex to manage

Having come across Chris Arnade, I'm currently reading everything I can find by him. On this blog I've touched on the matter of financial complexity many times, but mostly in the context of the network of linked institutions. I've never considered the possibility that the biggest financial institutions are themselves now too complex to be managed in any effective way. In this great article at Scientific American, Arnade (who has 20 years experience working in Wall St.) makes a convincing case that the largest banks are now invested in so many diverse products of such immense complexity that they cannot possibly manage their risks:

Since the peso crisis, banks have become massive, bloated with new
complex financial products unleashed by deregulation. The assets at US
commercial banks have increased five times to $13 trillion, with the
bulk clustered at a few major institutions. JP Morgan, the largest, has
$2.5 trillion in assets.

Much has been written about banks being “too big to fail.” The
equally important question is are they “too big to succeed?” Can anyone
honestly risk manage $2 trillion in complex investments?

To answer that question it’s helpful to remember how banks
traditionally make money: They take deposits from the public, which they
lend out longer term to companies and individuals, capturing the spread
between the two.

Managing this type of bank is straightforward and can be done on
spreadsheets. The assets are assigned a possible loss, with the total
kept well beneath the capital of the bank. This form of banking
dominated for most of the last century, until the recent move towards
deregulation.

Regulations of banks have ebbed and flowed over the years, played out
as a fight between the banks’ desire to buy a larger array of assets
and the government’s desire to ensure banks’ solvency.

Starting in the early 1980s the banks started to win these battles
resulting in an explosion of financial products. It also resulted in
mergers. My old firm, Salomon Brothers, was bought by Smith Barney,
which was bought by Citibank.

Now banks no longer just borrow to lend to small businesses and home
owners, they borrow to trade credit swaps with other banks and hedge
funds, to buy real estate in Argentina, super senior synthetic CDOs,
mezzanine tranches of bonds backed by the revenues of pop singers, and
yes, investments in Mexico pesos. Everything and anything you can
imagine.

Managing these banks is no longer simple. Most assets now owned have
risks that can no longer be defined by one or two simple numbers. They
often require whole spreadsheets. Mathematically they are vectors or
matrices rather than scalars.

Before the advent of these financial products, the banks’ profits
were proportional to the total size of their assets. The business model
scaled up linearly. There were even cost savings associated with a
larger business.

This is no longer true. The challenge of risk managing these new assets has broken that old model.

Not only are the assets themselves far harder to understand, but the
interplay between the different assets creates another layer of
complexity.

In addition, markets are prone to feedback loops. A bank owning
enough of an asset can itself change the nature of the asset. JP
Morgan’s $6 billion loss was partly due to this effect. Once they had
began to dismantle the trade the markets moved against them. Put another
way, other traders knew JP Morgan were in pain and proceeded to ‘shove
it in their faces’.

Bureaucracy creates another layer, as does the much faster pace of
trading brought about by computer programs. Many risk managers will
privately tell you that knowing what they own is as much a problem as
knowing the risk of what is owned.

Put mathematically, the complexity now grows non-linearly. This
means, as banks get larger, the ability to risk-manage the assets grows
much smaller and more uncertain, ultimately endangering the viability of
the business.

10 comments:

Thank you very much for the link. This brings up such a raft of issues it's hard to know where to start.

The period of the late 80s and early 90s will go down as a crucial one in my estimation. It was at that time that computer memory finally became cheap enough to allow Windows to function like a real operating system. It was also just after the release of the Internet protocols to the public. Finally, the first graphical web browser was made available in the early 90s.

I'd already become aware of the fact that spreadsheets were being universally adopted by investment houses. It can't be any surprise that the development trajectory for ever-more complex financial instruments grows steeply from then on given all that global computing power sitting on endless desktops across the financial universe, every bit of it linked to a global computing environment.

The idea of developing and managing such investments using nothing more than the ad-hoc processes and tools available in spreadsheets is very seductive. It's also extremely dangerous. Moreover, the overwhelming speed of adoption for the global internet and its protocols meant that this ad-hoc process would never be formalized. This industry got blindsided just as publishing, music, merchandising, and many other businesses have.

The stark fact it that, at this point, that process can't be formalized. The constant need to innovate on ever and ever thinner margins guarantees that these highly paid digital minions will be chained to those spreadsheets forever, even as errors proliferate. There is little testing and very little debugging. In short there is no lifecycle management. That is deadly and it is not sustainable for any length of time. But it's not the biggest danger.

That prize goes to a little-understood fact, one that you're blog goes a long way towards publicizing: the dynamics of these systems are now intertwined - thanks to that same networked computing power. It really is all one, an ecosystem. The banking and financial sector needs to understand that it is no longer just about competing against the guys and gals across the street, or a few routers down the line. The investment pools are global, the danger is global, because the damage will be global. The dynamics are global. We need to stop pretending otherwise.

This will be difficult enough to figure out with simple agents. To allow these bloated, overly complex entities to be major players is a major mistake. It's one that we'll continue to pay for till they are broken up. Gigantism is not a virtue, far from it. We need a different understanding of the world, a world where networked agents scale up into larger and larger aggregations with emergent properties. That's a vastly different world than the one which existed even 20 years ago.

It’s too difficult to manage megabanks because there are too much borrowers. I hate our banks because of too long queues. You should have take a lot of papers with you for taking loan. And also the rates of these loans are high. I use payday loans Canada and don’t think about rising rates. Of course these loans are not long-term and the sums are not so big but it is more comfortable for me to use.

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Physicist and science writer. I was formerly an editor with the international science journal Nature and also the magazine New Scientist. I am the author of three earlier books, and have written extensively for publications including Nature, Science, the New York Times, Wired and the Harvard Business Review. I currently write monthly columns for Nature Physics and for Bloomberg Views.